Now, how do you actually go about getting these assessments?

Say you want to build an agent and you want to know where do I get these peas from, right?

Do you like chocolate more than tea?

I think that was my example.

That's most people know can answer that.

But it might be difficult to, if we want to have the lottery, what's the P in the lottery?

With probability P you get chocolate and with probability 1 minus P you get tea.

And that's difficult.

So what people do is you kind of give people what we call a standard lottery, where you

don't give people the choice between tea and chocolate, but with the highest possible prize

and the worst catastrophe.

Those can be instantiated at will, but at least worst catastrophe you can normally kind

of give a standard value for that, that's instant death.

For many people that's the worst catastrophe.

And if that is not enough, then you say instant death of not only you but your whole family.

Whatever people care about.

And you only need to have one so you can always compare the current state against the worst

possible catastrophe.

And so the typical thing is setting up a lottery like this.

How much do you want to pay?

We'll come to money later, but for now we'll just think utility is money.

And this lottery really is something where I would just basically give you a loaded gun

for Russian roulette.

Think about, so you all know Russian roulette, right?

You have a six cylinder with six possible shots and only one bullet in there and then

you spin and then you shoot yourself.

And one out of six, you're fine.

And I'm just going to add a couple more barrels here.

Give you a one million barrel revolver and I'll ask you, how much do I have to give you

so that you'll actually pull the trigger?

And now you can ask yourself, how much would you want?

Would you do it for $30 or 30 euros?

No?

Any numbers you feel comfortable with?

10,000?

Don't worry, I don't have any.

Would also be very, very bad for my teaching record.

But those are the questions you want to ask yourself.

So that, if you ask yourselves about this, that's really the definition of a standard

lottery we call micromort.

This lottery is equivalent to what we call one micromort.

Utility is you die.

And micromortality is you die with one millionth of a chance.

Millimortality is actually not that useful.

Micromorts are useful.

So basically we normalize utilities with top and bottom, zero to one.

We know those kind of things.

That's very convenient because it makes computing easier.

And then we have micromorts being one millionth chance of death.

And that's a very useful thing if you need to make decisions.